1975. It must have been Crandon Park Zoo then. We had keepers that… In fact, I remember the television reporter that came out to investigate animal abuse allegations. He said, “You know, here are a list “of 10 complaints or something.” And one of them was a male lion that… Read More
Was it Crandon Park Zoo?… Read More
We did get it into her. She survived and she had several calves normally after that. So it was a successful procedure. Now from the crazy things that happened in 1975, there was a report that was submitted that some of the animals were being abused. Read More
Was there any evidence of abuse and how did you handle that kind of situation?… Read More
We gave her a long acting penicillin, and I figured, okay, I was gonna have to give her a shot every other day, a long acting penicillin, just to make sure we didn’t get peritonitis. This whole thing. Well, the first shot wasn’t so bad. You know, she stood there… Read More
Probably about 15 or 20 pounds overweight, dead and pulled it up. And then we had to suture her up. And of course it only takes about 15 or 20 minutes to make all the incisions. It takes a couple hours to sew her up. And I sewed up the… Read More
I came home in middle of supper, six o’clock or so he called and he said, “She’s down, she won’t get up.” Said, oh god, we gotta do a cesarean section now. So everybody had gone home. We had the night keeper and we had a friend of ours, a… Read More
And I had all the instruments there, and we tied her front legs to one palm tree back legs to another palm tree and shaved her side, left side and got ready. In fact, I started the incision and it started to pour down rain. So we covered up the… Read More
600 pounds, 700 maybe for the male. Cape buffalo weighs 1200 pounds. So they’re half the size. But we did not cut down on the amount of food. So they got really fat and we just didn’t keep on top of the whole thing. Well, one day the keeper came… Read More
Oh, forest buffalo weighs what?… Read More
We put all the lions in the night house, and drug these things into the outside exhibit. But they had gotten out of a giraffe exhibit that had rock base to it. I mean, they were big boulders in there, and how they dug out, I don’t know. But they… Read More
I got in the pickup truck and I drove around the zoo and there was no lights in the zoo. It was perfectly dark. Couldn’t find the hyenas. So I figured, okay, I’m gonna have to walk around. So I got outta the truck, and I started walking around the… Read More
He ran back there with that dart and the other two were sniffing around what’s going on, what’s going on. So I went up while they were there, walked right up to them and shot the other two. Had all three of them knocked out within well, 45 minutes after… Read More
So I figured the only thing I could do would be to try and shoot them with a capture gun, and tranquilize them. So I drove up to the hospital, I (indistinct) up six darts, figuring I could miss each animal one time. But I had three of them. I… Read More
How am I gonna catch three hyenas in the middle of the night?… Read More
And he did this for a couple years, and they started to break. He’d just wore them out (chuckles). But one night he called me, it was 11 o’clock at night and I’d just gone to bed. And he says, “Doc.” He says, “The hyenas got out and they chased… Read More
I kept thinking all the time, what am I gonna do?… Read More
Yeah and a little bit of courage too I guess. One night of that, we had a night watchman who was in his early seventies and essentially deaf. I mean, you’d have to yell at him to make him hear you. And I used to go out at night at… Read More
Well, let me think on that a second. We had some interesting things come up, fortunately that we could resolve. Read More
Where your sense of humor came in handy?… Read More